304 HEAVEN and HELL §509
anymore, or teaching or fear of the law or fear for their reputation,
because they are acting from their nature, which cannot be compelled or
broken by anything but punishments.
Good spirits are never punished, though, even though they have done
bad things in the world. This is because their evils do not come back. I
have also been granted a knowledge that their evils are of a different kind
or nature. They do not stem from any deliberate resistance to what is
true, and they are not from any evil heart except the one they acquired
by heredity from their parents, which blind pleasure drove them into
when they were involved in outward concerns separated from inner ones.510 Every individual comes to the community where her or his spirit was
in the world. Each of us, as to spirit, is actually united to some commu-
nity, either heavenly or hellish, evil people to hellish communities and
good people to heavenly ones. (See § 438 on the fact that we are brought
to our own communities after death.) Spirits are brought there gradually,
and ultimately get in. When evil spirits are in the state of their deeper
concerns, they gradually turn toward their own communities, and before
this state has been brought to a close, they face them directly. When
the state is completed, then the evil spirits plunge themselves into a hell
where there are people of like mind. To an observer, this plunge looks
like someone falling backward head fi rst. The reason it looks like this is
that such people are in an inverted order. They have loved hellish things
and spurned heavenly ones. During this second state, some evil people
go in and out of various hells; but they do not seem then to go headlong
the way people do when they have been completely undone.
The actual community where their spirits were in the world is shown
to them, too, while they are in the state of their outer concerns, so that
they know from this that they were in hell during their physical life; but
still they were not in the same state as the people who are in hell itself.
Rather, they were in a state like that of people in the world of spirits. I
will explain later what this state is like compared to that of people in hell.
511 The separation of evil spirits from good spirits takes place in this sec-
ond state, since in the fi rst state they were all together. The reason is that
as long as spirits are focused on their outward concerns it is like the situ-
ation in the world—evil people together with good ones and good ones
with evil ones. It is different when people have been brought into their
inner natures and are left to their own nature or intentions.
There are various means used for this separation of good people
from evil ones. Often it is by their being led around to the communities
they had been in touch with through their good thoughts and affections
during the fi rst state. This brings them to communities they had misled